New Kindles Announced Yesterday

I like the keypad on the Kindles of the current generation, but the touch would be nice. No mention in this article of whether the Fire uses LCD or the new colour E-ink, but it turns out it is only an IPS LCD panel (IPS is good for LCD, and being a tablet rather than a colour e-book LCD makes sense, but I was hoping to see some colour e-ink this fall.

The good news for consumers is that they're all priced below $200, with the low end, smaller kindle at only $79 USD.

Sadly, no new DX model yet. I like the DX size for reading Adobe PDF formatted e-books (computer manuals, text books, gaming books). Maybe the next DX will be the colour e-ink model???

Here's a link to the CNET story:

Amazon unveils Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire tablet

Adobe Virus Update

Users can undo the change, as it is in the Current User part of the registry, but here are the lines to add to the login script.

reg add "HKCU\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\9.0\JSPrefs" /v bEnableJS /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add "HKCU\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\JSPrefs" /v bEnableJS /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

You need both lines to get Adobe Reader and full Acrobat Reader/Writer.

The new Reader 9.2 gives the users a better warning saying that it can be potentially hazardous to turn it on and allows them to choose to turn it on "for this document" or permanently. (until they log in again and the script shuts it off again.)

More Adobe PDF Viruses On The Loose Patch On The Way

"You can get viruses from a PDF?" you say??
YES you CAN!!! and Seth Hardy of Symantec's MessageLabs just did a talk the other day at SecTor 2009 about how he's been able to (in a test lab) create a virus, embed it in a PDF and get past every known antivirus. This is scary stuff folks, and there is one little thing you can do to stop most of it.

HelpNet Security says that a new round of these viruses is out in the wild and Acrobat 9.1.3 is vulnerable, but a patch is coming on Oct. 13th. In the meantime they recommend turning off Javascript.

Open up Adobe Reader/Acrobat and turn off JavaScript! Yes, PDFs can have Javascript, though you've probably never even seen a PDF file that legitimately uses Javascript.

Here is how you do it in Reader 9.1.x :
Click on the Edit menu, click Preferences.

Select Javascript from the Categories menu.
Click the checkbox OFF next to Enable Acrobat JavaScript